Try Hard and Believe
by Yvearia
Summary: One-shot of vignettes throughout the lives of the Winchester brothers. Sometimes Dean has some pretty good advice, but other times... Set before, and during the series. Some post-season 10 premier. No major spoilers. Rated T for language.


"Won't fit," Sammy said in his squeaky, three-year-old voice, a note of defeat on the end.

"Yes, it will." Dean, sitting next to his little brother in the front bench seat of their dad's car, drew the words out in exasperation. He'd been sitting in the car all afternoon. Staying low, staying quiet, and, most importantly, making sure Sammy didn't cry.

He wasn't sure if his dad knew it, but there wasn't a whole lot to do in the Impala all day. He'd tried to get the baby to take a nap – 'cause that's what Sammy was – a baby. But it had just started a fight between them when he'd said, "Go to sleep Sammy. Babies are sposed'ta sleep a lot." Then little brother began to yell, "Notta bay-bee!" and Dean had to calm him down quick if he didn't want Dad to come back and be mad at him for not keeping the kid quiet.

They'd looked at some of Dean's comics, even though there were a few words Dean still had trouble sounding out on his own. Then they'd found dad's comics, with _real_ pictures. Of girls. Dean didn't know why, but he got embarrassed when he looked at them, and he shoved them back under Dad's seat. So, he'd told Sammy some stories instead – what he could remember of a movie he saw at Uncle Bobby's house once, called Rocky. But he couldn't remember much of it, so he ended up making up a bunch of stuff.

Finally the kid was tired enough to sleep. Dean drifted off too, waking up to his brother laughing and chanting, "Bay-bee Dean!" over and over. He meant to pinch the kid but he knew it would have caused another tantrum, so he decided to distract them both with some peanut butter, straight from the jar. They didn't have any bread right then anyway.

His latest tactic had backfired again. He double dared Sammy that he couldn't shove three Legos into the vents on the dash. He knew it would be bad when Dad finally got back – he remembered how scary-mad he'd been last year when Dean found the olfa knife in the glove box and decided to make a bunch of cool, little cuts in the headliner. They were just so straight, and perfect, and clean.

Now baby brother sat next to him, sad like he was about to cry, holding two Legos in one fist and one in the other. Dean pried the sharp pieces of plastic out of his brother's hands and went to work on the dash vents. It took a while for each piece, but they all eventually fell through the openings with a satisfying clink of plastic on metal. Dean turned back to look at Sammy once the job was done.

"Whoa! How'd you?" Sam asked in awe and admiration, a look of disbelief painting his tiny face.

"You can do anything, Sammy. Just… try hard. And… think you can." Seven-year-old Dean wasn't exactly sure that was true, but it sounded right. It sounded like the kind of thing his comic book heroes would say, so, he figured, it was the right thing to tell his baby brother.

* * *

><p>Their motel was next to a small supermarket this time. Dad had been gone about two and half days now and Sam was getting antsy. It was a lot harder to keep a ten-year-old occupied than their dad probably realized – even when it <em>was<em> a nerdy bookworm like Sam. So, that night, Dean snuck into the supermarket parking lot after the store closed.

He came back to the room to find his little brother blowing a wadded up piece of paper around in the bathtub with the motel hair dryer. "God, you are painfully weird," he said by way of greeting.

"Shut up! Where'd you go?" Sammy switched gears from angry to curious in an instant when he noticed the flush in his brother's cheeks.

"You wanna do something fun?"

They headed out of the motel room, locking the door and taking the key with them, Dean dutifully laying down a line of salt before they left. It was past midnight, and the motel parking lot was quiet. The structure had been built around the time Dean was a baby – he guessed – on a hill in a little town outside of Birmingham, called Leeds. The parking lot was made up of a bunch of different levels, surrounding the 'Motel on A Hill'. There were stairs with metal railings all over the place, and Sam and Dean had watched a couple of boys do tricks with their skateboards here, earlier in the week.

When they got far enough out of the circle of security lights, and the bulk of the cars, Dean motioned to the supermarket cart he'd swiped from the neighboring lot.

"What are we gonna do with that?" Sam asked, incredulously.

"Skate tricks," Dean answered, as if it should have been obvious.

After about ten minutes of cajoling and shaming, Dean convinced Sam to climb into the metal basket, and he was careening around the empty lot with his brother in tow.

"Let's see what kinda air we can get!" Dean shouted, steering the cart toward a set of concrete steps.

"Whoa, un-uh!" Sam shook his head, praying this wasn't one of the times his older brother had decided to be a jerk and 'not hear' anything Sam had to say.

"What? Are ya gonna be a baby?" Dean pressed, though he slowed the cart down almost to a stop.

"You can call me whatever you want, but I can't – I won't – do anything that dumb, Dean!" Sam took the opportunity to abandon ship while the cart was going relatively slow. "You shouldn't either," he called after his brother, who'd picked up the pace once Sam was safely on the ground.

"Just try hard, and believe in yourself!" Dean shouted back. He propelled the cart toward the stairs and let it go, picking up speed as he chased after it. Just as the front wheels hit the first step, Dean leapt, attempting to land inside the basket, and ride it down to the lower level in triumph.

The night had ended in the ER, with Uncle Bobby making the drive down from Sioux Falls after the nurses had failed to get a hold of John. Dean had bruised a couple of ribs and twisted his ankle pretty badly. They sat in the back of Bobby's truck on their way back to Sioux Falls for the remainder of their dad's job in Alabama.

"Well, smart ass," Bobby finally said an hour into the road trip. "Was it worth it?"

Dean sat up straighter next to his brother, a smirk settling on his lips. "It was _so_ worth it."

Sam shook his head and laughed softly as he heard the old man mumble under his breath, "Idjit."

* * *

><p>The boys sat in the Impala waiting for their dad to emerge from the post office. After they were done with this and food shopping for the next few days, they'd find a bar and celebrate dean's twenty-second birthday with double cheeseburgers, fries, and a couple of beers – soda for Sam. It was the same every year.<p>

They were arguing over something truly stupid, and for a moment, Sam couldn't think of a reason not to just stop talking altogether. Why keep the issue in play at all? But against his better judgment, he kept talking.

"I can't. I just… What's the point?" He slouched down in the back seat defiantly – he was taller, now, than both Dean and their dad – and ran his hands through his shaggy hair. It was getting time for a cut, he thought, absently.

"The point is… why not?" Dean turned around from his seat up front and flicked a long piece of hair hanging close to Sam's eye. He was rewarded with an angry huff, but not much else. Okay, so his little brother didn't feel like messing around. Depressed Sammy. "And, sure you can, Sammy. I always told ya –"

"Yeah, yeah. Don't say it, okay? And _don't_ call me Sammy."

"Well, if you ain't gonna take your chances with that, I will. She is _easily_ an eight – eight point five – Brother, and she's clearly into you. But, hey… You don't wanna hold me back, I'm not gonna make you."

They were talking about the overnight desk clerk at they Days Inn they were currently staying at. She'd slipped Sam her number late last night when he couldn't sleep and had ventured down to use their laundry facilities. She was probably closer to Dean's age, if you could guess from the college textbooks she'd been skimming through. Sam thought about Dean making a move on the girl instead. He probably wouldn't like her – she'd use big words that his downstairs brain wouldn't be able to process. He was about to tell his brother as much, when John opened the driver's door and broke up the argument.

"Hey, what gives?" Dean asked as they pulled into the motel parking lot, instead of continuing with their regularly scheduled program.

"Go inside and start packing more salt shells," John answered, a clipped tone to his voice.

"Job pop up after all?" Dean asked, opening the car door and stepping outside. Sam reached for the back door handle to follow his brother but his dad's voice stopped him abruptly.

"I need to talk to Sammy alone. We'll be inside in a minute."

Sam glanced over the back of the seat and saw the stack of mail John had just picked up from the post office box. There was a letter settled on the top of the stack. Thick envelope. A red letter S fronted by a green tree was emblazoned next to the words _Stanford University Admissions Department_. He could see that the packet had been roughly ripped open, and he felt his stomach sink through the metal undercarriage of the car to the concrete lot below.

"Dad, I can explain."

About twenty minutes later, Dean heard the car rattle to life again and he paced to the window to see what was going on. Sam stood, leaning against a pillar near the stairs to the second floor of rooms. The Impala was pulling out of the lot and swerving onto the highway. Dean opened the door and called for his brother.

"Sammy – Sam," he corrected hastily. "What's goin' on? Where's the fire?"

"Anywhere far away from me, apparently."

Dean watched his little brother, shoulders slumped, fist clenched around a packet of papers, looking angry, and for all the world like he was about to cry. Sometimes he looked at Sammy and he didn't see the seventeen – almost eighteen-year-old – hunter. Sometimes all he saw was that same kid that shoved the army man into the Impala's ashtray, then cried because he couldn't get it back out again. Guess he'd learned early that his decisions had consequences. Too bad he kept making the wrong ones.

John didn't come back that night, or the next. Sam had bloodied his fist punching the brick column as their dad had driven away. And Suzette – the late night desk clerk – had happily volunteered to clean up the cuts. Dean spent a few hours that night behind the front desk in the motel office while Sammy ended up doing exactly what he'd been so sure he couldn't do earlier that day.

When John came back, they didn't speak about the blow up for another four months. Not till the night Sammy left for good.

* * *

><p>"Best pies in the county," Dean smiled, motioning the waitress back to their table to refill their now-empty cups of coffee.<p>

Sam shifted the laptop on the table to look at the plate she'd sat down in front of Dean a few minutes earlier. "An entire pecan pie…" he said, shaking his head at Dean in disbelief.

"Pie helps me think, Sammy."

They were sitting just inside the door of a little warehouse looking building in Marble Falls, Texas. They'd been tracking a particularly nasty critter – a _skaluh_ – all the way from Louisiana when the trail finally went cold just this side of Burnet County. Sam was sifting through news articles, googling anything having to do with the bizarre and unnatural.

"How do you even know about this place?" Sam asked. Dean had jumped at the chance to stop as soon as he saw the Exit for Marble Falls, and drove his Baby straight to the café without making a single wrong turn.

"Covered a lot of ground those four years you had your nose stuck in books."

Sam snorted. "Yeah, you don't complain too much when it's time to do research." He glanced over the screen of his computer once more. "There is _no way_ you're going to eat that entire pie."

"Aww, ye of little faith, Sammy. Any amount of pie is a single serving as long as you try hard and believe in yourself."

"What is that, Shakespeare?" Sam chuckled.

"Bitch."

"Jerk."

* * *

><p>The first time the Bunker had been infiltrated, it was a witch. Like, the really wicked kind. Like, Elphaba Thropp wicked. And she hadn't exactly infiltrated, so much as materialized from a jar of goo that was already <em>in the bunker<em>.

This time, they'd come in from the outside. Warding and magic security systems be damned. The one thing that had worked, though – the bunker's lockdown. Now they were trapped inside with some kind of super-demons who could slip past all the mac-daddy precautions the Men of Letters and the Winchesters could throw at them.

Dean groaned in pain, the metal shard in his right shoulder lancing pain all throughout his central body mass. "Weapons?" he questioned gruffly as he braced himself while Sam began collecting shop towls strewn around the underground garrage, making bindings to staunch his brother's bleeding shoulder.

"In the armory," Sam called back. "Last I saw as we were moving past, there's at least three already in there."

Dean gritted his teeth in equal parts frustration and pain. Why couldn't he have pulled Baby into the garage when he'd parked her this morning? At least they'd have the weapons they kept stashed in the trunk. Now they were locked in and she was locked out. The bastards better not fuck with his girl, he fumed silently.

"Don't you keep guns stashed pretty much all over this place?" Sam asked as he tied a strip of white towel – quickly soaking up the blood and turning an orangey-red – around Dean's shoulder. He left the metal in place for now, afraid he'd increase the bleeding if he removed it.

"It's a big place, Sam," Dean bit back. "There's a couple in the kitchen – but there's also knives in there, so… The first floor john's got a derringer and a twenty-two."

"You stashed guns in the bathroom?"

"Trust me, Sam. You _do not_ want to be caught unawares in the toilet." He muffled another groan as Sam finished binding his shoulder. "I don't know. It's mostly in the armory. Or in my room. Huh…"

"What?" Sam asked as he tried unsuccessfully to get a signal on his cell – make a desperate call or text for help.

"Weapons. In my room, Sammy."

"Yeah, except there's about a half dozen demons blocking the way between here and there Dean. We can't get to your room without going inside, upstairs, through the library, and back downstairs again." Sam dismissed the plan out of hand, searching around for anything they could use as a weapon. He grabbed up a long-handled sledgehammer and a fire ax, from a random pile of tools in the corner.

"My room is on the other side of this wall," Dean panted, tapping the cinder blocks that were now supporting most of his weight. He reached for the fire ax in Sam's hand and nodded his head at the sledgehammer. "Know what I always told you, Sammy. Anything's possible if you try hard and believe in yourself."

~Fin

* * *

><p>This story was inspired by something my husband always tells me. Try Hard &amp; Believe. It usually comes into play when I've done a completely 'dumb-blond' thing, and I'm marveling at my stupidity. He said this to me the other night and all I could see was that shit-eaten smirk of Dean's when someone says it can't be done, doesn't exist, could never happen. So, this little gem popped into my head and flowed out of my brain. Written in about an hour and a half, this piece is totally un-beta'd. All mistakes are mine.<p>

Hope you had fun reading it. I had a blast writing it!

Yve


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